The Swarm
by SteeleFic
Summary: In an alternate Washington, the Swans and a handful of families have survived for decades in the forests while the world has burned. A very different Bella leads a ranger crew to investigate sightings of woodsmoke near the old I90.
1. Chapter 1 of 5

A meagre fire of bleached and knotted driftwood spat fat orange sparks and a thin column of smoke into the cool purple-lit evening. Around it sat four figures in the dark furs and dull pitted armour of Bas-Quebec militiamen sharing a meal of blackened rock-lizards and pale steaming blanchéroot. Arrayed behind them were bedrolls and simple tents, bundles of swords and pikes wrapped in leather and muddy linen, a pile of small circular shields held together by iron bands criss-crossing like pie crusts. Four exhausted mounts foraged for grass and trailing riverweed along the meltwater stream that meandered by the camp.

The youngest of them was a smooth-faced youth half-hidden in the armour of a much larger man. He stripped the slick greyish meat from a lizard leg with a pair of cracked front teeth and threw the matchstick-thin bones into the fire. The others filled their gear more convincingly; they were experienced men, faces heavily lined, noses twice-broken and inexpertly set, hair grey and oiled tightly back or hanging in greasy blades around scarred and sunken cheeks. They ate in silence, jaws busy breaking down the tough blanchéroot cords.

The youngest militiaman lifted his tin cup and stretched. He wandered upstream of the horses and dipped his cup to drink. He lifted it to his lips and closed his eyes, smiling; the water was fresh, glacier-cold all the way to his stomach, each gulp blossoming along inner contours before the cold met the heat of his meal.

Then there came a sound, a single low guitarstring twang.

The boy was dead before he could turn, a steel-shafted arrow entering the back of his neck at a steep angle and pinning him to the ground through the throat. He would not call out. His cup fell from his fingers and into the stream, where it bobbed in the foam and slipped away with the flow, followed by a twisting and billowing cloud of arterial red.

'Leave one alive,' said Bella Swan, pointing back along the stream towards the thin tongue of woodsmoke. 'Chase him this way.' Her men nodded and crept away, hugging the treeline.

She skidded down the steep needle-coated bank and ran lightly across the crunching pebbles to the young militiaman's body. She planted a booted foot on the young militiaman's neck and pulled her arrow free, wiping it clean with a gloved hand. She loaded the dull-tipped shaft into the runners of her leafspring bow. The bow had been her father's, a single piece of steel recovered from the suspension of an old cement truck, shaped and re-purposed into a weapon able to punch holes in quarter-inch armour at fifty paces and a obliterate a skull at five hundred. She fixed her jaw and drew the bow, stifling a grunt as she did, the muscles of her arms and back gathering and knotting into a riot of angry fists beneath her green-stained skin. She counted down from five.

From downstream came yells and gurgling cries, then a wild splashing gallop as the largest of the militiamen burst around the dogleg bend in the stream on horseback, kicking up water and blood, the arrow-stuck and broken body of his comrade bouncing behind him with one foot caught in a stirrup. The flat wide face Bella saw beyond the gory spray bore no expression besides his knitted brow and the hard thin line of his lips, a look not of terror but of consternation. He kicked the saddle free as he passed, the whole mess of leather and arrows and shattered limbs throwing up a shower of red foam as it skidded into the water beside her fresh kill.

The rider was fifty yards away and picking up speed before Bella could compose herself. She would have only one chance. She took a breath, aimed just a hair above the rider's head, and let fly.

A guitar twang, a whistle of wind, a vanishing line in the air. The arrow had left the bow cleanly. Her men rounded the corner, wooden bows half-drawn, glancing up just in time to see the wicked steel shaft bury itself the horse's rump. Horse and rider fell as one into the loose shale and shallow water, the horse all kicking legs and flashing eyes, the man pinned awkwardly beneath.

'Go.' Her men ran to claim her prize.

Bella slung her bow across her back and returned to the campsite. The night was drawing in and the fire burned only weakly, so she took the small bundle of fuel the men had gathered for the night and threw it on. In the healthy new glow she saw the fight play out. She saw her four rangers descending on the three militiamen, catching one through the eye in their introductory volley. He still lay where he'd been hit, a bundle of tattered black bearskin and hammered iron, a length of steaming blanchéroot still clutched in one calloused hand, arrow jutting from his face and snapped in two in his fall. Skidding tracks and half-buried arrows in the mud showed that the remaining two men had run downstream for their horses, straight past their bundle of weapons. There was a fight over the first horse they came to-a dispute solved by more arrows, this time at close range. The remaining man had toppled the body from the saddle and made a run for it, running alongside the horse for cover.

She picked through their bundle of weapons and found nothing of use. Simple swords and rusty spears. Nothing more complex than a slingshot had blown in from the East-or any direction, for that matter-in twenty years. In the early days, her father had taught her, there had been rifles and guns of all kinds, and plenty of ammunition for them. You were sure some new and predictably temporary State King or Minor President would surface every now and then, which meant an endless supply of arms caravans moving back and forth along their overgrown little patch of the I90. They would bomb them or topple them with mudslides and take whatever they could use-figuring that they were doing some poor bastards somewhere a favour. But that well had run dry. The cities had regressed to medieval pits. Having run out of bullets and the means to make more, men had taken to slaughtering each other with improvised clubs and swords. They formed gangs and warbands, tribes and doomed resurrectionist governments. The coasts were a mess. The Aryan Nation were at war with the Black Panthers and The Families in the shelled-out remains of New Jersey. A group calling themselves The Last Irish were running a nightmare campaign of ethnic cleansing out of Boston. Los Angeles was a churning chaos of warring streets. The Pope of California was at war with the Rainbow Resistance in San Francisco. Closer to home, Seattle was a no-go for any able-bodied man or woman wishing to avoid being drafted into the endless holy war with Vancouver.

Her men arrived with the surviving militiaman and sat him bruised and bleeding by the fire. They stripped him down to a faded FDNY t-shirt and filthy thermal underwear. He shuddered without making a noise, clutching an arm that was clearly broken in different directions at the elbow and the shoulder.

'Gather the bodies,' said Bella. 'Get them up out of the water. Take the saddles from the horses and send them on their way.'

She looked to the militiaman. 'Are there more of you?' He shook his head, eyes fixed on the fire. She pointed to the youngest and fastest of her men. 'Watch duty. I want you on higher ground. Look out for more smoke.'

He turned to run, then paused. 'By myself?'

'By yourself.' Bella spoke through a fixed grimace. 'Man up. We'll make camp nearby. We'll leave sign here for you to find us.'

'But...the beast.'

'The beast! If you meet the legendary dog-boy, tell him we have his supper right here.' She aimed a kick at the militiaman's leg. 'Not another word!' Her scout pulled his hood over his head and ran for the treeline, sinking from the light into the wild foliage and grasping dark of the valley wall.

She sat by the militiaman and stoked the fire with a branch. 'I'm going to need to know why you're here. We don't accept tourists in these parts. Sightseeing is not an option. But if you give me something I can use, we'll see about re-setting your arm and putting you back on the road. With a fundamental change of orientation, of course.'

'Lissen good, bitch,' spat the battered man. 'Ain't no simpler way to put it. All of you are dead. So just come to terms and go back to whatever shithole you've been hidin' in and kiss yer family goodbye. That's about all I has to say to you or anybody. You can let me go or stick me full of arrows for all I care. I'm dyin' either way.'

'Tell me what you mean.'

'Not sure that I want to. Boy you killed was my nephew. Hated the little scumbag, but it's the principle of the thing.'

'Where are you out of? Who are you with? Bas-Quebec? Closer? That's canuck armour. Or is it a knock-off?'

'They're going to pluck the head off your neck, lady. They're going to pluck it off and empty you out like a bottle of ketchup.' The militiaman-or whoever he was-leaned his head back and smiled. The teeth on the left side of his jaw were bleeding stumps. 'Stories from New York were twisted enough, but you shoulda seen them in Chicago. Shoulda seen them in Minneapolis. The swarm. The endless swarm just amblin' west toward the red setting sun. They're still not done with Spokane.'

'Who? Tell me.' She felt for her bow. 'Were you scouts for this army, is that it? You want what little we have here, is that it?'

'Army!' he laughed. 'I said it was a swarm and I meant it! We ain't scouts! We're just the first deserters from a hundred last stands! We've been running just ahead of the bloodsuckers since they busted through Detroit!'

One of her men whistled, pointing at a rocky ridge downriver. Somewhere just beyond it, a single burning arrow was following a long arc back to Earth. An emergency signal from her scout.

No time to find you, it meant.

Just run.


	2. Chapter 2 of 5

The Spokane Coliseum was a skeletal ruin, rows of rusted steel ribs poking from a peeling beige corpse of concrete and corrugated iron. It sat in silent blue 4am murk-light and cool, still air. The corpses of cars littered the parking lot, hollow heaps of rust and sleeping weeds, stripped and gutted by the decades since they had been hastily abandoned.

A girl in denim and filthy Hello Kitty rags picked her way through the overgrown lot and towards the Coliseum. Her hands felt for obstacles hidden in the dark, anything that might suddenly clatter or scrape and give her away. She stepped as lightly as she could, barefoot, a pair of running shoes reinforced with tire rubber and duct tape slung over her shoulder. Her breathing was quiet and suffocatingly shallow.

She turned, crouched behind a car, and peered back in the direction that she had come. Framed in the losenge-shaped rear window she watched two figures slip out from behind a squat concrete pillbox that had once been the parking attendant's hut. The pair were equally slim-bodied and long-limbed, clad in patchwork orange overalls and dully-reflective steelworker's aprons made form-fitting by the application of leather belts. One carried a long crowbar, the other a wickedly curved parang made from sharpened plate steel. They vaulted effortlessly over the barrier and settled into an upright stroll, confidently avoiding debris, narrow noses raised to sniff at the air, eyes coolly scanning the scene. The crowbar was allowed to drag and bounce on the concrete, ringing like a bell.

The things were no longer her brothers, but they knew how to pretend.

'Mary Brandon, come on out! We don't want to hurt you!' The voice was Gary's. She heard the parang whip twice through the air.

'Yeah! We have something to give you!' The thing that had once been funny and gentle Pete let out a cruel, bestial whoop and smashed metal and glass with his crowbar. 'Come on, you ungrateful little bitch! Don't you want to know what it's like?'

'After all we've done for you!' Gary again. 'Who raised you? Who made sure you always had a fire and something to eat? Who wiped up all of your shit when you were little? Who searched through towns full of crazy fuckin' rapists and sewer witches to find clothes and books for you?'

They were twenty yards closer in a single breath. She spread her hands over the car's hood and raised herself slowly from her crouch; the car let out a soft metal whimper. She screwed up her face at the mistake, damning the car for its betrayal. 'We want some return on investment! You know what that means? It means when you put all of that effort into something, you should get something real special in return!'

'Yeah!' They were on her, shadows suddenly swallowing her up. A sound like an explosion followed by a shower of rust-flakes, the crowbar giving the car a stout lick across the hood and barely missing her fingers. 'You're our flesh and blood, Mary! Our flesh and blood! But tell you what-'

She turned to run.

'-We'll only take the blood!'

Pete's crowbar found her shoulder at the end of a long downward swing. White spots exploded in her vision. The air fled from her lungs and her legs buckled uselessly under the shock that the impact sent reverberating through her. She felt her collarbone erupt through muscle and skin as she hit the ground. A second monstrous blow found her hip, sending her spinning, shattering her pelvis like glass and twisting her spine in two. Gary scooped up her shoes with the curved blunt edge of his parang and threw them clear of the parking lot with a grunt.

Darkness beckoned. With her loved ones dead or worse and her body broken beyond repair, she gave herself freely to it.

###

She had not expected to dream.

At first the darkness had been the darkness of death; it was great, wide, empty, numb, weightless, all and none of these things, and all of it slipping quickly away. Then there came a transition. She did not remember leaving that death-dark behind, but at some point she had, and the new darkness that surrounded her was much heavier, and closer, and colder.

She found that she could move in it. She drew her hand through the new dark and it responded by flowing around her. If she had hands in the death-dark she had not remembered them. But she remembered now.

She reached out and felt stone, cold and polished. She felt her way along it, fingertips tracing straight bevels and ornate carvings. She came to a corner, then felt her way along the new wall in the same way.

Five stone walls. A small pentagonal room with neither floor nor ceiling within reach. Thick fluid, cold and cloying, not water. She did not feel the need to breathe with any urgency.

She resolved to swim upwards until she found the chamber's ceiling. She kicked out with her legs and kept close to the nearest wall, feeling her way upwards. She felt her way past carvings and wrapped her fingers around grilles, propelling herself with legs and hands. The fluid thinned out as she climbed, until it became positively watery, and she began to perceive a faint reddish glow from above.

The wall began to curve gently towards the middle of the room, the horizontal carvings that had been prevalent giving way to vertical lines and deep, forking channels. The deepest channels ended in holes that were three or four fingers wide. Timid warmth flowed from the holes, met the cold and rose in dark streamers that she could just about make out against the brightening glow.

She came to at the zenith where the chamber's walls met in a bright point. She could see clearly now; the fluid around her was nearly transparent but for the faint streamers from below and the cloud of slowly-dispersing red she had dragged up with her. The bright point was a snaking electric bulb sealed behind a circle of thick glass. One wall had a metal door inset a few feet below the peak, a ovoid hatch with a tiny lightless window above a circular wheel, bristling with bolts and cogs. She pushed out from her wall and over to the door. She cupped her hands around the glass to peer through.

A hand gripped her ankle and pulled her sharply away. Her chin caught the wheel and her teeth slammed together with a deafening clack. The hand pulled her down into the dark. She kicked at the thick fingers with the heel of her free foot and was grasped immediately by a second hand. The hands pinned her legs together and the fingers interlocked around both. The grip was astonishing and unyielding; she was drawn down as if suddenly encased in concrete from the knees down. She reached out to grip the wall and upon feeling it drew sharply back; it would have been like trying to stop a runaway horse-cart by reaching down to the road and digging her fingernails into the cracks in the asphalt.

Rushing, and falling.

She bent and felt at the hands, found a fingertip and tried to peel it away from the rest. Her hands slipped again and again. A bubbling wail of frustration left her, useless against the rushing flow. Something bitter and metallic filled her mouth and nose and she wondered for all of a second if she'd bitten her tongue, before the awesome terror of the truth came to her and left her limp.

The rushing stopped and the hands drew her down gently and firmly until they were on her shoulders and the soles of her feet found the cold stone floor.

A man's voice welled up from somewhere the back of her head, sonorous and clear and unechoing. 'Open your eyes,' it said.

'They're open,' she said, her voice a dull, far-off bubbling.

'No. Only the lids are open. You can only see the mundane. If you want to know this place, you must open your eyes.'

Fingertips ran down her arm and a large hand enveloped hers. It formed her hand into a fist, then unfolded her forefinger and tugged at the tip. It shaped her fingertip into a long, needle-sharp point. Something new came over her then; a feeling of immense calm replacing the paralysing terror. A new understanding blossomed, chasing confusion. She had only to open her eyes. The hands released her and she stood free in the dark.

She used her needle-finger to peel away her corneas. She ran the point around her ragged irises and pulled them away. The aqueous humour behind her Earthly lenses met and mixed with the divine essence of the chamber and-for the first time since her brothers liberated her from her stinking, pointless, worthless mortal shell-

Mary saw.

'I am Stregone Benefic,' said the glittering figure before her. 'I have many children, but you are unique among them, and I am so very glad to meet you.' He was a striking figure, the body of a leanly muscled man in his early forties, cast entirely in molten gold. His eyes were oceans on fire. 'My children retreat from death and become undead; that means of retreat is my gift to them. You alone have passed through death to discover me, here, in this most sacred of places. That makes you quite a find, Mary Alice Brandon. Not undead but deified. I wonder what else you might be able to do?'

The dark was gone. The pit was clad in bright gold. Rivulets of magnesium white ran along the many channels carved in the walls. The essence flowed out from the walls like liquid lightening, surrounding the man who called himself Stregone Benefic, curling around him and flowing into him like flames seen in reverse. And now she saw that the first tentative tendrils of that glorious energetic flow were reaching out to her.

She reached out and cupped the strange liquid fire in her hand. It sank through her skin into the veins of her arm and raced for her heart, which shuddered with delight and sucked greedily at it. The walls reached for her and the energy was welcomed in every pore and orifice and vein. Her heart beat faster and faster, bouncing off the inside of her chest like a trapped animal. She twisted in the flow, swaddling herself in it, pressing herself against the nearest wall, exploding with joy.

After minutes or hours or days Stregone was there, a wide smile on his face, a hand reaching out to lift her from the floor. 'Quite invigorating, isn't it? All my children work in some capacity to ensure a steady supply, but you are one of just a few to have experienced the blood here, in its most refined form.' He held her to his chest. 'My child. I name you Alice Benefic. Show me what you can do.'

She closed her gaping eyes and searched within herself. She was Mary from Spokane, raised in a freight car by her brothers. She read encyclopaedias by firelight. She once killed a man with a rope when he tried to sell her as a slave. She ran from the strangers when they came. She ran from her brothers. She was beaten to death in a parking lot.

No. Mary was an artefact of circumstance, not destiny. Mary was past tense.

She was Alice Benefic, a machine for the further refinement of blood-essence into something etheric and unworldly. That process had a byproduct. She followed it. Found the edge of something, picked at it. It unravelled.

###

She saw a convoy of six tankers, each pulled by a team of oxen and undead giants in chains and yokes, blood hoses running down gullets, mouths sewn shut around them. Whips cracked, muscles bunched and shifted in unison. Sweat-steam hung around the teams in clouds. The convoy was the nucleus of a swarm of hungry bodies a mile wide and six miles long; hundreds of thousands walked below her, moving in eddies and streams, orbited by hunting packs that flowed into houses and villages and returned with fresh blood for the swarm and the tanks, screaming as they are variously drained or transformed.

Each tank, she knew, was full of divine essence harvested in Northern towns. The blood would supply the pit for months. But the convoy was a feint, a distraction, something to bind the swarm together. The real prize was the swarm itself; a pool of refined blood with a hundred times the capacity of the tankers, enough to supply the pit for a decade.

They had sacked everywhere between Detroit and Seattle. They were lumbering East to their reward.

She was not alone. Eyes watched the convoy from the trees. Eyes that watched and hated and glowed gold. They peered through her.

A shift. She saw a cripple throw off his cloak and stand tall to take on a hunting pack, twisting heads from shoulders, bursting spines. Under the disguise of mud and rags was a lean figure, fine-featured, eyes narrow but exploding with the same golden fury she'd seen in the trees, a dark-lipped mouth set in an impassive line.

She saw one of the blood-giants free from its yoke, holding the hard-eyed man between two boulder-sized fists, ready to snap him in two.

She felt something flash through the night, puissant with hope and anger. She heard someone cry out.

###

'Edward,' said Alice. 'Who is Edward?'

Benefic held her at arm's length. 'First among my sons, and now your brother. He has known my sanctum as you have. He leads the mission into the West.'

'He will betray you.'

Stregone Benefic exploded in a blinding column of twisting gold and white. The streams of blood-essence detached from him and retreated to the walls. The pit shook. Alice averted her gaze.

'He will not!' A voice like planets colliding.

'He will. I don't know his heart, but I have seen his actions. He will try to destroy the convoy and disrupt the swarm.'

Benefic settled, his form gathering and knitting. 'But Edward. My boy Edward. What could turn him against the gift? Against his family, against the divine? I trust your vision, daughter, but I wonder if it can be usurped. I have a task for you, then. Find him. Assist him. Discover his intentions. If he can be swayed, sway him any way you can. If not, you must gather your brothers and, with their help, return him to me. I will sway him myself. If all else fails, he must be destroyed. I love him as I love you, but the family comes first.'

Benefic took her hand.

'Some rule from thrones and towers. They rule with arms and terror. They are doomed to fail, all of them. The world has been turned on its head, so rule from a pit. I rule with whispers and a love undying. Return now to your Earthly vehicle. You may return to my side when you have ensured your brother's loyalty and secured our supply in the West. This is my bidding.'

Alice Benefic smiled. Her father reached into the crown of her head and tore her in two.

###

Alice woke to find Mary's brothers greedily draining her broken form by the throat and the thigh. With her good arm she dispatched Pete, noiselessly severing his head from his neck. She drank a mouthful of the blood that gouted from him-some of it her own just minutes earlier-and felt the bones of her shoulder and pelvis grinding and cracking and reforming. She pulled the shattered collarbone from her neck and felt a new one snake between her shoulder and chest. She drank another mouthful of her brother and felt stronger again.

Gary broke from his blood-haze and looked stupidly at his brother's slumped form. Alice twisted her spine back into place and stood, patting herself down. She stretched and yawned and killed Gary by pulling out his throat.

Alice threw up Mary's last meal while twisting off her brother's head to get better access to the major arteries. A grey bolus of half-digested fish and beans splashed over the concrete. There was not a drop of blood in it.


End file.
